Why do we get the terrible feeling that once the Lance Armstrong’s televised handwringing is over, the one who’s going to end up apologizing is Oprah Winfrey?
The top-secret (Maxwell Smart Division) meeting has been common knowledge for a week. They taped the show on Monday.
What we’d hoped for is a confession. More importantly, that’s what’s being sold.
Apparently, that’s not quite what we’re going to get.
“I would say he did not come clean in the manner I had expected,” Winfrey told CBS This Morning on Tuesday. “It was surprising to me.”
Surprising? This man has lied his way through all manner of quasi-legal proceedings, thrown nearly every friend he ever had under the rear wheels, and you thought a soft colour scheme and a loveseat was going to break him?
Winfrey is above all a competent salesperson, so she was not about to write off the whole exercise.
“I think you will be satisfied,” she said of the interview.
That’s certainly true if you have some time to fill. Originally planned to air for 90 minutes on Thursday evening, the interview will now be spread over two nights on Oprah’s OWN network.
The only satisfaction will come if Armstrong is forthright. That would be a first. No weasel words, no ‘Well, you have to understand . . . ”s. And about more than doping. Armstrong is not accused of being a cheat. He’s accused of being the Cheater-in-Chief. He’s been part of an ongoing and abortive process to give some sort of confession to cycling and doping authorities. When that process hit the skids, Armstrong turned to Oprah.
Few men in history have had so strong an urge to stage manage their own terminal decline.
From this vantage, this sounds as if it will end in disappointment (and Thursday night must certainly end that way — why else would we tune in Friday?).
